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[Discussion] [Very Long] Reflections On Ignite

Discussion

[UNNECESSARY BACKGROUND INFO ON ME, AKA WHY YOU SHOULD READ THIS]

This is going to be a very long, pretty prescriptive post, so let me start off with some credentials. I've played PoE for a pretty long time (since Talisman), and while I'm far from the best player out there, I was the #2 living Chieftain in Bestiary HC and something like the #10 Elementalist, for a week or so, starting a few days after the start of the league.

I've also got great huge gobs of competitive gaming, game balancing and design experience, from beta testing an expansion for Impossible Creatures, betas for Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance and SupCom 2, and membership in the [Project M Development Team](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_M_(video_game\)), a mod for Super Smash Bros Brawl with over 3 million downloads. I’m also currently leading a small team developing an unrelated fighting game.

I’ve been a top 5, 10, or 50 player in all of the above games, and several more besides. I’m awful at PUBG, send help.

None of that is to say that I’m the greatest at games or have the best ideas, just that I have a decent idea of how to make and break game systems. That, and I love game design and I think this stuff is at least worth reading. I also love PoE, and while I’m pretty sharply critical of GGG at times, I think they’ve got some brilliant minds behind the scenes and they regularly pleasantly surprise me.

To GGG: this post isn’t because I think I can do your job better than you guys - I just want to present some angles that may or may not have come up in your internal meetings, and also maybe soften some of the harsh public reaction on the current state of ignite.

As a game designer, I know well that players tend to be very good at finding problems, and extremely bad at prescribing solutions. That said, please read this with an open mind. I think I’m onto something.

[/UNNECESSARY BACKGROUND INFO ON ME]

So, ignite. What the hell’s up with it? Why’s it so bad? Does GGG hate ignite builds, and Elementalist in particular?

Well, no. Here’s why.

What is a DoT?

Fundamentally, a DoT, or Damage-Over-Time, is any skill or ability in a game that deals the bulk of its damage to enemies over some duration (or at intervals), rather than at the moment of impact.

DoTs are notorious problem children in game design. They’re difficult to balance and make satisfying for players to use; and doubly frustrating for players to fight against. When players are using DoTs, they tend to feel unsatisfying, unresponsive, and ‘mushy’ as there’s little or no immediate feedback relative to comparable abilities with upfront damage. Playing against DoTs tends to be doubly frustrating for players because of that same lack of feedback, resulting in a feeling of helplessness as they’re unable to mitigate the damage after the effect has been applied.

Because this damage does not occur immediately, it by definition cannot take opponents out of the fight as quickly as frontloaded damage can; and therefore, in order to be balanced, any DoT needs some sort of significant advantage over a comparable source of frontloaded damage. Not only does the balance gap between DoT and the empirically better frontloaded damage type need to be traversed; but in order for the ability to feel strong and worthwhile, DoTs almost necessarily need to be overtuned relative to frontloaded abilities.

The most common ways of doing this are as follows:

  1. Stacking damage. Two strong examples of this in PoE 3.1 are Scorching Ray and Essence Drain. The damage achievable on these skills with next to no investment (especially on Scorching Ray with Balefire and Elemental Equilibrium) is absolutely nuts when compared to almost any skill that deals its damage upfront. This makes these skills feel impactful because enemies just disappear under a tsunami of DPS.

  2. Applying additional debuffs for the duration of the DoT. A great example of this in PoE is Blight: not only does the Hinder debuff help with player safety (compensating for Blight’s relatively low damage), the immediate slowing effect provides a tremendous amount of snappy player feedback: you feel like you’re doing something impactful and hitting enemies in the face. Bleed gets an honorable mention for its prominent, satisfying sound effect, and the power of the additional damage applied when enemies move.

  3. Rewarding players directly for having applied the DoT. “Vampiric” or “leeching” skills which heal or buff the player for the duration of a DoT debuff are an extremely common archetype in basically every RPG, but PoE’s angle on it is a bit different: typically rewarding players for hitting or killing a DoT’ed enemy, either through ascendancies (Trickster, Gladiator, Occultist), or gear (Haemophilia gloves, Balefire, Wasp’s Nest, etc).

I’m getting around to my point. Please bear with me.

On Unique Ability Identities, and PoE’s DoTs

One of the fundamentals of game design is supplying players with a feeling of power and agency. Another way to put this is that it’s critical for players to feel as though they’re making meaningful, impactful decisions about how they’re experiencing the game. To this end, it’s mission-critical for GGG to tune its DoT abilities in such a way as to reinforce this feeling of player agency: all the DoTs need to feel different.

Historically, making DoTs has been pretty easy. Ignite was all about making a single, extremely-powerful hit that inflicted a brutal ignite. Burn was about ‘melting’ things with the player as the source, rather than actually setting them afire. Poison was about quickly stacking papercuts. Bleed was … just kinda garbage.

Two issues arose with this model.

  1. Players wanted to play Bleed builds. Cool! Now GGG had to make Bleed good, which was fine and sensible. Unfortunately, the best way to flavor Bleed was to base it on inflicting a single, extremely-powerful hit, which inflicted a powerful bleed. Sound familiar? Yeah, this unfortunately stepped on Ignite’s toes more than a bit. Ignite was now kinda stuck without its own unique identity.

  2. Players discovered how to double-dip. Uh oh. While PoE is all about balance through imbalance, the power levels achievable through double dipping were so massively egregious that it necessitated a nuclear-level response. GGG was forced into a huge (seriously, the amount of work that went into this is basically incomprehensible) rework of just about every system in the game in order to return its balance to something resembling sanity.

As a result of (2), as well as a host of other issues that were understandably deemed more-urgent (such as ascendancy reworks and 6 new acts) or simply arbitrarily prioritized (adding new uniques like Coralito’s to make Poison playable after the double-dipping fix), Ignite has, uh, been sort of left out in the cold.

That brings us to today. Clearly, given their considerable (though careful) recent attention to poison, GGG intends to buff and/or rework ignite. In order to buff or rework ignite, they need to very carefully consider Ignite’s identity relative to those of the game’s extant DoTs. Here’s the pickle they’re in.

Ignite vs Bleed

As mentioned before, GGG’s (again, sensible) solution to Bleed’s underpowered-ness and identity problem came at a cost to Ignite’s identity. Now we have two DoTs that are both (Even with Crimson Dance or Emberwake, the low number of stacks available doesn’t really change things) fundamentally based on inflicting a single huge hit, and basically waiting. With Bleed, this makes sense intuitively as players opening a vein, having blood gushing out, whatever - particularly considering the massive bladed weapons typically used to do so.

This particular identity doesn’t seem to fit quite as well for ignite, particularly because of the existence of elemental proliferation. If ignite damage is too easy to scale, Elementalist instantly, necessarily becomes objectively the best ascendancy. Again. If it’s too hard to scale, as is currently the case, it’s basically just a worse bleed.

Compounding this problem is that Bleed doesn’t apply automatically on Crit, and is most closely associated with Melee builds - both of which imply that given the current state of affairs, Bleed necessarily needs to be numerically much stronger than Ignite in order to compete, because it’s much harder to inflict - especially in a world where Elementalist’s Conflux exists.

I don’t think GGG intends to stick with this model for Ignite, and I don’t think they should - as it’s pretty much necessarily going to be a worse Bleed, which isn’t a satisfying solution for anyone.

Essence Drain is worth a special mention here, as while it’s not tied to melee users like Bleed, it is also limited to a single stack, and is relatively difficult to apply due to its slow projectile speed and because it needs a second button (Contagion) to function properly against packs. So, for pretty much the same reasons, a straight numbers-buff would just necessarily make Ignite a worse Essence Drain.

Ignite vs Poison

Due to the double-dipping fix, Ignite and Poison were left in a superficially similar spot. According to the wiki,

The default base duration of poison is 2 seconds. The base damage per second dealt by a given application of poison equals 20% of the combined physical and chaos damage of the base damage dealt which applied that particular instance of poison.

And

The base duration of ignite is 4 seconds. The burning damage over time is 40% of the base damage of the hit of fire damage, per second.

Mathematically, it’s pretty easy to see that on a hit with identical base damage, an Ignite will deal 4x the damage of a Poison, because it deals twice as much DPS, for twice as long.

What gives, then? Why is Poison on the weakish side of playable, while Ignite is just useless right now?

Two things.

  1. Poison can stack, is rewarded for stacking (via Vile Toxins, Assassin’s ascendancy, Wasp’s Nest, and other factors), and is relatively easy to stack with high attack or cast speed. While Ignite’s base damage is theoretically higher, it lacks all of the massive scaling factors available to Poison, and it becomes very quickly out-multiplied. Players wishing to play an Ignite build cast Flameblast (or whatever other skill), and then are forced to kinda just wait around with nothing to do, and no way to meaningfully scale their damage.

  2. This looks like a dev time issue. While these numbers look somewhat arbitrarily chosen, new uniques have been added to improve Poison; the Assassin and Trickster ascendancies have some strong new poison enabling nodes, and imo a near-certain buff to Perfect Agony after the endless complaints about its current state. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Ignite has been untouched during this time: it’s due for a larger rework that GGG simply could not fit in the last few cycles.

As I argue in the “bleed” section, I don’t think a simple numbers increase to Ignite is a good idea, because it’ll necessarily step on Bleed’s toes, and necessarily be a worse version of Bleed. Likewise, I think it’s pretty clear that any Ignite rework shouldn’t be based on stacking Ignites - as that would be intruding on Poison’s identity, and due to how much easier Ignite is to apply, it would again necessarily end up as a worse Poison.

Ignite vs Burning

I think I can safely say that Ignite damage versus Burning damage is a pretty massively confusing issue for new, and even relatively experienced players, and their relative identities are a bit muddied at the moment. As mentioned before, “burning” damage can probably be more accurately described as “melting” damage, though the damage from Ignite also technically counts as Burning damage (but not all Burns are Ignites) ---

--- and you probably see my point. The change some time ago to Herald of Ash from applying an Ignite to a Burn didn’t help, nor does its confusing local “more burning damage” wording which falsely appears to imply a global modifier.

That’s not to say that the changes to HoA were a bad thing. Quite the opposite; it now appears to more or less do the job of the old ignite prolif: massive single hits that overkill are rewarded with a Burn that spills over onto surrounding enemies: effectively helping single-target builds to compete a little more effectively in terms of clearspeed, and now helping Elementalist in particular feel badass.

Between Burning Damage being what it is, and Herald of Ash functionally taking the place of old Ignite Proliferation, this leaves Ignite in a very weird spot. If its numbers are simply buffed, Ignite’s identity relative to Burning becomes no less confusing, and Ignite Proliferation functionally has no unique utility or identity relative to Herald of Ash (unless Ignite is OP in which case Proliferation becomes insane).

Here’s another factor that makes Ignite vs Burn even more confusing:

Consider the relationship between Chill and Freeze. While their relationship is a little bit complicated, it’s well-defined and easily understood with a little explanation.

Chill is easier to apply (doesn’t require a crit or a %freeze roll), and Freeze is more beneficial. Perfectly intuitive. ‘Applies Chill’ and ‘Applies Freeze’ both require that the applicable cold damage surpasses some minimum threshold of the opponent’s HP: you need a significant hit to do an appreciable chill or freeze. Chill helps to apply freeze, due to the brilliantly-designed Hypothermia gem. Ergo, there’s at least a clear one-way relationship where Chill -> Freeze; while Chill is lesser, it’s a stepping stone. Chill and Freeze both tend to be scaled by the the same items and nodes (Increased Effect of Non-Damaging Elemental Ailments, Taryn’s Shiver, Added Cold Damage, etc).

While Ignite and Burning Damage are both scaled by Fire and Burning Damage nodes, they don’t otherwise have much of a meaningful relationship. Even stranger is their mutual relationship to other Elemental Ailments: they’re both specifically excluded from the horrifically worded Increased Effect of Non-Damaging Elemental Ailments.

When looked at in a historical context of the current balance situation as we did earlier, this situation isn’t surprising. That said, another pillar of game design (and design in general) is that Simplicity is Desirable, and relationships between concepts should be obvious where possible. You can see this principle in action in the anti-double-dipping rework of Ignite and Poison damage: they’re both DoTs that scale from the base damage of the inflicting skill - there’s a clear symmetrical relationship.

Just as fundamentally as being a DoT like Poison, though, Ignite is an Elemental Ailment. In service of that same principle of simplicity and elegance of design, perhaps we could aim for additional symmetries and synergies with the other Elemental Ailments.

In Summary of The Problem:

A simple numbers increase can’t make Ignite feel powerful and satisfying without making it extremely OP relative to Bleed. Allowing Ignite to stack like Poison can’t make it feel powerful and satisfying without making it extremely OP relative to Poison. Again. Also, Emberwake and The Taming exist. Ignite and Burning have extremely uncomfortable, awkward, unintuitive relationships with each other, and with the other Elemental Ailments.

So, what now?

Working Towards A Unique Identity for Ignite

Let me preface this with the fact that it’s much, much easier to diagnose design problems than it is to come up with solutions. Solutions are usually a product of a hell of a lot of trial and error and iteration and trial and error and iteration. I’m not on GGG’s design team, so I don’t have that luxury: all I can do is speculate.

So, on with the speculation! This is gonna get pretty abstract and weird. Please continue to bear with me.

Fire Damage in PoE

Fire consumes and destroys, and makes more fire until everything is either fire, or ash. Fire Damage in PoE communicates this flavoring by a few means:

  1. Being the ‘final stop’ on the conversion chain for most practical purposes. Phys -> Lightning -> Cold -> Fire -----> Chaos, technically, but achieving 100% Fire->Chaos conversion is pretty much impossible afaik, but either way, Fire is the final element, and not by accident.

  2. Avatar of Fire strongly encourages players playing Fire builds to play builds exclusively geared to deal Fire damage. Even though Chaos is theoretically the end of the conversion chain, AoF overrides even that.

  3. While Heralds of Ice and Thunder have pretty strong mutual synergies (especially when Call of the Brotherhood/Berek’s Grip comes into play; and even moreso when Herald of Thunder is linked with Hypothermia and/or Ice Bite), Herald of Ash only turns Phys damage into Fire damage - and Fire Damage into even more Fire Damage.

  4. Chance To Ignite and Immolate support gems both supplement your Fire Damage with more Fire Damage.

5, Unlike Cold and Lightning damage, Fire (via Burning) does not need to hit in order to be highly destructive, due to the existence of Scorching Ray and RF.

  1. Scorching Ray also supplements your Fire Damage with more Fire Damage.

So, while Ignite's identity is a little fuzzy right now, Fire damage in general certainly is not. I think we can pretty easily define its identity as follows:

  • Exclusive, synergizes primarily with itself

  • Focused on pure damage, rather than utility or defense

  • Less dependent on big hits than Cold and Lightning damage, but still prefers big hits when it is hitting.

Existing Uniques and Other Notes

Regarding uniques:

There are a whole pile of uniques that benefit from repeatedly igniting an enemy, such as Razor of the Seventh Sun, Ngamahu’s Sign, Oro’s Sacrifice, Xoph’s Nurture, and a couple others. These uniques directly counter-synergize with Ignite’s current design of being solely based on a single huge hit. As a result, these uniques are extremely difficult to use effectively. Buffing their various utilities (Heal on Ignite in particular) would be tough without making them mandatory for all ignite builds, and simply buffing their other numbers would dilute their identities and contribute to power creep.

I think an ignite rework should synergize with these sorts of uniques, and make them feel as if they have a real place in the game. GGG rightly resists rebalancing uniques much more strongly than rebalancing skills, the tree, or other factors - because acquiring and owning uniques is such a core part of PoE gameplay.

Also, rebalancing these uniques would introduce a monumental pile of development overhead, which we’re not about if it can be at all avoided.

Restrictions

So, keeping in mind Ignite’s identity as an Elemental Ailment, as Fire Damage, and as distinct from Poison, Bleed, and various Chaos skills:

So, what must we do with an Ignite rework?

  • It must deal Burning damage. Even if we do come up with something fancy, ignite is what it is: you’re on fire.
  • It must be useful to a variety of builds. We cannot pigeonhole players too hard into a tiny subset of skills in order to effectively use Ignite.
  • It must maintain a unique identity relative to other DoTs.
  • It must be scalable to deal massive amounts of damage, commensurate with Fire Damage’s identity as an overwhelmingly destructive force.

What should we do with an Ignite rework?

  • It should synergize with Fire Damage.
  • It should focus on pure damage, rather than utility.
  • It should have some sort of symmetry with other Elemental Ailments to aid with understanding, and help untangle the mess that their lack of relationship has caused on the skill tree.
  • It should draw on players’ existing understanding of Ignite to be intuitive
  • It should synergize with existing uniques to function well and in a satisfying fashion.

What should we not do with an Ignite rework?

  • It should not be too much like Herald of Ash in terms of operation.
  • It should not clear maps by itself too easily when paired with Proliferation - Lightpoacher in particular is dangerous here. Spectral Throw, Burning Arrow, and other projectiles are also very likely to get out of control if this isn’t controlled for.
  • A rework should not require any more dev time from GGG than absolutely necessary.

What can we not do with an Ignite rework?

  • It cannot stack infinitely: that’s poison’s domain, as explained earlier; and results in inevitable balance impossibilities.
  • Its utility cannot continue to be based purely on the damage of the initial hit: that’s bleed’s domain, as explained earlier; and results in inevitable balance impossibilities. AKA a pure numbers-buff won’t work.
  • It cannot double dip.
  • It cannot have its primary utility based in anything other than pure damage.

Potential Solutions

Have you ever poked a campfire, and observed how the fire flares up when you shuffle the logs around? I think GGG was onto something with the design of the Immolate gem: fire flares up when poked.

Remember ten years ago, when I explained the most common ways that DoTs are balanced versus comparable sources of upfront damage? For reference, here they are:

Stacking damage Additional Debuffs Rewarding Players

I think we need to borrow a little bit from each of these in order to come up with a satisfying rework. The simplest version of my proposal is this:

  • Allow players to use the Ignite debuff (2) to stack additional burning damage (1), and thereby be rewarded for hitting Ignited enemies with fire damage (3).

In more detail:

It’s clear that the damage of Ignite is in need of at least a modest damage basic boost - perhaps attainable by allowing “Increased Effect of Ailments” nodes on the tree to also affect Ignite. However, it is desperately in need of damage scaling, and synergy with its own uniques and gems. Players, I think, should be rewarded for synergizing fire damage with fire damage, and using ignite as a tool to do so.

So, here’s the pitch with some example math pulled from thin air:

  • “The base duration of ignite is 4 seconds. The burning damage over time is 40% of the base damage of the hit of fire damage, per second. If an ignited enemy is again hit by fire damage, it is inflicted with an additional Burn, which deals 20% of the base fire damage of the subsequent hit over one second. While Ignite cannot be stacked (barring Emberwake), subsequent burns can.”

I’m not at all confident in the numbers, but here are some strong points in defense of this system (assuming proper tuning of the numbers)

  1. It enables ignite-based builds other than Flameblast, and allows even builds based on a single huge ignite for clear, to supplement their single target DPS by focusing a target down with Firestorm, Flame Surge, Incinerate, or really any other skill. Hell, why not Molten Strike? This should help Ignite-based builds to be able to do bosses ever, without making them strong to the point of degeneracy for clear speed, as Elementalist has been in the past.

  2. This system has strong built-in synergies for most or all of the mentioned unique items, further increasing build diversity. It also shouldn’t necessitate many (or any) real balance changes to extant uniques, saving on dev time.

  3. This gives Immolate a strong, well-defined role as a central gem for Ignite-based builds, which would depend on having a large amount of base fire damage - against Ignited enemies in particular.

  4. As mentioned, this system’s strong synergy with currently under-used skills such as Incinerate and Flame Surge (which can’t inflict Ignite, but could theoretically inflict a burn!) should help them compete more effectively in the current meta, relatively cheaply in terms of development time.

  5. This gives Ignite and Burning a closer, more intuitive relationship with one another, in a way that’s at least a vaguely symmetrical with Chill and Freeze.

Obviously, this isn’t the only solution that fits my description above:

Allow players to use the ignite debuff (2) to stack additional burning damage (1), and thereby be rewarded for hitting ignited enemies with fire damage (3).

We could, for example, require an igniting hit (like Chill and Freeze and Shock) to deal above some base percentage of the enemy’s max HP in order to take effect. Overall, I think this may be a more elegant solution, but runs into the major problem that Ignite builds would likely be often totally unable to damage Shaper or his Guardians - at all.

Because this, and other potential solutions based around the same idea, are likely to overcomplicate the issue and muddy the waters, I’d prefer to maintain focus on the general idea, and the principle of rewarding players who hit ignited enemies with additional fire damage.

I don’t really have any more. Thanks so much for reading. Even if you violently disagree, I hope it’s been at least thought provoking; and I hope at least one person reads this and is less upset at GGG for not yet having improved Ignite. I think they’re taking their time for good reason.

Posted Mar 22, 2018, 7:34 PM UTC · edited

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InSearchOfThe9Unannounced•

I think the issue with your proposed solution is that it's too complex for a status ailment, particularly because it's multifaceted. Cold damage chills and freezes based on the mob's life, lightning damage shocks based on the mobs life, chaos/physical damage (can) poison based on the damage of the hit, and physical damage (can) bleed based on the damage of the hit. Saying "fire damage ignites based on the damage of the hit, but it also (can) add a Burn, based on a smaller amount of damage from the hit, which is basically a stackable ignite", is pretty obtuse and isn't that just poison anyways? I thought you wanted to avoid that.

Regardless though it's a discussion worth having. The damaging effect of ignite is largely irrelevant outside of Elementalist builds right now, which is a shame.

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Odds_OPHierophant•

I think the issue with your proposed solution is that it's too complex for a status ailment, particularly because it's multifaceted.

That's possible, though I don't really see it as more complicated than the combination of freeze and chill, especially because the latter are complicated by the necessity to pass a maxhp% threshold in order to take effect.

isn't that just poison anyways? I thought you wanted to avoid that.

I don't think so. Chance to Poison is separately calculated every hit, and there's a ton of gems and mechanics that specifically reward stacking poison.

The proposed ignite rework only allows you to apply ignite once, but allows you to benefit from subsequent Fire hits without having to scale Burning damage specifically. Essentially, it in principle allows players to use Ignite as a modest-but-appreciable source of supplementary damage even if they don't want to scale purely ignite. This is in stark contrast to the all-or-nothing nature of poison.

It also allows players to get mileage out of two-button builds. While Poison pretty simply wants to stack itself as high as possible and get that mileage out of the Assassin ascendancy and Vile Toxins, there are no bonuses available for stacking any given number of burns on an opponent - and so there's no reason to prefer any particular point on the Big Hit <-> Many Stacks continuum.

As mentioned, I'm more interested in the context and the restrictions on possible reworks, than sold on that specific one. There's a pretty wide variety of reworks that fit the necessary criteria, I think - and it's worth discussion.

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Soulless•

Perhaps a slightly less complicated solution would be:

“The base duration of ignite is 4 seconds. The burning damage over time is 100% of the base fire damage of the hit, dealing 50% less damage per second. (so 100 -> 50 -> 25 -> 12.5). Dealing additional fire damage to an ignited target refreshes this timer"

The theming here is that fires, once lit, have a big "WOOSH", and then settle down before finally puttering out. However, if you keep poking it like you said, you can keep it at "WOOSH."

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charlz2121•

I like this. It's similar to but slightly more flavorful than my idea, which was ignite stacks up to, say, 4 stacks and deals 10 or 15% of the base fire damage of the hit per second. So you could ramp up or "get the fire roaring" by hitting 4 times and refresh the stacks or "stoke the fire" by continuing to hit that enemy. It's similar to poison, but I feel the capped stacks is different enough it could work.

My other thought was more in a defensive direction. If you're on fire, you panic. You could leave burning as "melting" damage and have ignite apply a fear effect.

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Epicly_Curious•

and have ignite apply a fear effect.

Ignite does apply fear. Monkeys and other humanoids run away when first ignited, or if they do not still do it, I know damn well they did at one point early in beta.

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Areatus•

That's a pretty fantastic idea. Make it so it only changes the ignite with a new one if the new hit deals more damage, but keep refreshing the old one otherwise. Would make hitting with a big flameblast then machinegunning (Firestorm, incinerate, etc) just keep the ignite from flameblast up. Altough that sounds OP in numbers...

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2percentnotthemilkChieftain•

I think a dot that peters out is the best idea I've seen in this thread. It's simple, mechanically distinct from bleed and poison, gives great feedback with massive upfront damage, and rewards multiple hits and active playstyles by keeping the blaze at full power without strictly requiring it.

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AgedeeKaom•

I really like this idea. It is really flavourful and it gives you things to do in prolonged fights without you having to spam the enemy 24/7 to keep up you damage. The resulting playstyle would therefore be quite different to poison builds.

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MauranKilomDeadeye•

I like the idea, but it's pretty broken. Land one big hit, then just spam whatever skill.

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Drop_•

While that is true, the main value of Stormfire is the ability to apply ignites via lightning damage so as to trigger EE. That effectively works as a 50% more multiplier (or better).

Then, on top of that, as an elementalist you can have shock for another 50% more multiplier.

But really as mentioned the only real uses for this are big lightning attacks or HoT.

Also worth noting is that none of the lightning spells have decently damage effectiveness.

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Drop_•

Storm fire hasn't put ignite in a "good place" but it's made ignite viable in this one extremely limited situation.

I love stormfire.

But make no mistake that stormfire is sort of an anomaly, and outside limited skills and ascendancies ignite still isn't workable.

And even then I don't know if you can push stormfire from "ok" to "good" in general.

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CrowdCon-troll•

Think of it like this:

I hit something, its ignited. It has the Ignited debuff. Its dealing 40% of my hit as Burn damage.

I hit the ignited thing, and it gets a second burn debuff giving 20% more Burning damage.

The second debuff would stack, allowing a single ignite to have multiple burning instances. Emberwake would allow you to add a second ignite, with its own burning stacks.

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Shiva-•

Honestly. I think Immolate is a good step in the right direction, it just doesn't do enough. Immolate should also add % damage.

And I would like to see someway to "detonate" an ignite. Not Elemental Focus which just outright prevents ignites, but a way to immediately do full damage of an ignite.

Making ignite another poison or bleed is just boring and redundant.

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Kazang•

The problem with Immolate and it's synergy with Ignite is that things that effect one most often do not effect the other.

The supports that are optimal for hit damage do nothing to for Ignite and vice versa (Controlled Destruction vs Increased Burning Damage).

Meaning to get good Ignite damage you get no hit damage and to get good hit damage you get no Ignite damage.

Specialisation is all well and good, but when specialisation in Ignite has such pathetic returns it's just mathematically not worth it and on top of that it reduces your potential hit damage as well.

Ignite and Immolate would be much better if spell and general hit damage applied to both. Not twice and multiplicative with each other, as previously in the double dipping meta, but just once to each source of damage. Which would enable hybrid Fire hit and Ignite builds to be at least semi-competitive with pure hit or pure Burning(RF and SR) builds.

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Kazang•

but this misses out on what would make a hybrid Fire Hit and Ignite build good: stacking ignites, which reward hitting the enemy multiple times with fire damage.

I don't disagree with your points but I don't think that is actually necessary though.

Ignite is not actually that bad for general gameplay, it is still quite good for clearing and sub Guardian level bosses. It's roughly the same as ED in terms of damage, and ED is fine.

The problem as I see it as to get that decent clear you have to throw Hit damage and single target out the window, or use SR. And if you are using SR for single target anyway it doesn't make much sense to bother with Ignite at all.

Being able to use a single 6 link Fireball setup for clear with Ignite, and with decent Hit damage for single target with a moderate dot competent that while not massive is still significant would be a pretty simple change and enough to make it a viable alternative to SR.

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Drop_•

I don't know if it's on purpose. When they did the reworks they said they were trying to make them a good bonus if you don't focus on them, but viable as their own source if you do.

Ignite fails both tests. With maybe one viable ignite build (stormfire elementalist I think is about it), and with ignite damage being so diminishingly small as to not matter in 99% of builds that don't focus on it, it's become a non-factor.

So either GGG failed hard while trying to make it decent, or they lied to us about wanting it to be in a good place.

It's also worth remembering that in beta many sources of ignite stuff was nerfed. Emberwake got the stiff penalty of slower burning and flameblast went from ailment bonus matching hit bonus to being halved.

It's curious as to why.

1
Shiva-•

Yeah. I know. I was suggesting something like Immolate causing the target to take 20% more fire damage. Lower the on-hit damage to compensate.

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5
LoateWriter of Words, Dier of Characters•

(Fellow game designer here, though I haven't had time to work this through as cleanly as your post so bear with me)

Well presented and thought out post, though I don't think building Ignite into Burn is necessarily the way to go (though I believe it's on the right track).

I actually was theorycrafting an idea around the stacking ailments (Bleed/Poison/Ignite) for if GGG ever let me do another unique, but it could easily be modified to work solely with Ignite to help give Ignite its own design space as you referenced.

In my head the mechanic is titled "Consume", but for Ignite I think "Combustion" would make more sense. Essentially the goal would be to reward players that use Ignite in multiple small hits, as well as players who use it in fewer bigger hits, so that way it feels like the player is constantly involved. As far as a mechanical standpoint, we already know the game tracks all Ignite instances on a target, but only applies the largest one, so minimal back-end work would need to be done there. The way "Combustion" would work is as follows:

Every time the player Ignites a target, the Ignite contributes a set amount of damage over time to the target based off the base damage of the skill/spell (the way Ignite currently works). In addition, the monster now starts accumulating a hidden Combustion damage number (also likely based off the base hit to prevent shenanigans), which DOES NOT apply its damage yet. If a new Ignite is applied, it starts adding its Combustion damage to the Combustion total along with any existing Combustion damage (if you play Monster Hunter at all, think of something similar to the Blast element), but only the highest Ignite continues doing the damage over time component.

When a monster reaches a certain life threshold (my preference would be 50% for whites, 60%/30% for blues, 80%/60%/40%/20% for yellows, and 90%/80%/70%/etc. for uniques) all CURRENTLY applied Combustion damage immediately detonates for its combined amount, and all Ignites/Combustions are removed.

Theoretically, what this should do is allow players to focus on multiple ways of applying Ignite - either as several big hits (Flameblast/2hander fire damage Heavy Strike archetypes) that easily achieve Combustion thresholds via hit damage, do heavier Ignite damage, but may not have a lot of Combustion damage; or as multiple smaller hits (Incinerate/Molten Strike archetypes) that might take longer to get to each threshold, have much less Ignite damage, but apply a heavier Combustion when they eventually reach it. In addition, it also keeps the player active throughout the fight, since if the Ignites fall off before the threshold is reached, the Combustion damage is wasted. Flip side, however, is that you know you'll always hit Combustion at certain points, so you're incentivized to really try to push bosses/yellows to those thresholds while the maximum number of Ignites are applied.

I think this mechanic definitely meets your criteria for making Ignite synergize strongly with fire (as the more fire/Ignites you apply, the bigger your Combustion will be), while keeping it thematically different from both Poison and Bleed (and thematically consistent with the idea of overwhelming fire itself). The only dev time would be creating the Combustion tracking system itself (would need to be built from the ground up, but could probably borrow from Explosive Arrow back-end mechanics extensively), as well as balancing numbers (which, admittedly, might be a tall order as I'm not at all familiar with how their code works).

Anyways, I think you're right in that they do have plans for Ignite, and we'll just have to be patient.

18
JeffDEEtvElementalist•

I remember talking about Ele Ailments with a friend and telling him that Ignite should be some kind of "living bomb" where fire damage would place a detonation charge on the monsters and fire damage would make the fuse burn faster.

This is essentially what I had in mind with better words, "Ignite effectiveness (combustion effect)" would make that fuse "burn faster" thus making the living bomb explode faster.

Although, I don't know if Combustion should be an Ignite overhaul or just a new Support gem/Chance to ignite overhaul. Ignite as a plain burning effect isn't wrong, and the reason why I say a Support gem might be better is because the current "best" way to use ignite is kind of like playing Old EQ Bleed builds, you want slow BIG fire dmg instead of fast hitting spells. With a support gem like Combustion you could exchange your "BIG HITS" to "Multiple Hits to boom". Giving access to more playstyles.

I think right now the problem is that big slow hitting spells/skills were/are out of the meta. Flameblast Prolif used to be amazing for ignites and with the new Ele and HoA I can see that gaining more popularity. Earthquake's AoE was gutted so full fire conversion EQ is meh, but I'm pretty sure something decent could be made with new Chieftain or Elementalist. [[Stormfire]] gave us a nice way to stack Shocks/Ignites from lightning damage, so Storm call Ignite and HoT with Elementalist is pretty good right now.

All in all, Combustion would be great as a support gem so that Faster hitting fire spells/fire dmg could have a way to scale from Ignites, without the current Hard hitting fire dmg getting obsolete. Since poison is Stackable and Bleed is kinda just a weird poison now. Fire keeping the "HIT HARD, BURN HARD" still seems fitting.

6
PoEWikiBot•

Stormfire

######StormfireOpal Ring

####Requires Level 80 #####(15-25)% increased Elemental Damage #####(40-45)% increased Mana Regeneration Rate #####+(20-30)% to Fire and Lightning Resistances #####(4-6)% increased Burning Damage for each Enemy you have Shocked Recently #####Adds (1-3) to (62-70) Lightning Damage to Hits against Ignited Enemies #####Your Lightning Damage can Ignite When your skin sloughs, and your blood cooks,

you'll wish the lightning strike had killed you.

^^Questions? ^^Message ^^/u/ha107642 ^^— ^^Call ^^wiki ^^pages ^^(e.g. ^^items ^^or ^^gems)) ^^with ^^[[NAME]] ^^— ^^I ^^will ^^only ^^post ^^panels ^^for ^^unique ^^items ^^— ^^Github

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JeffDEEtvElementalist•

I won't argue with this, it's also a factor as of why Ignite fell off. GGG are taking a few good steps in the right direction. Maybe some specific fire spells should have a %more burning damage modifier to them to shoehorn some spells into ignite(incinerate?).

The biggest problem with ignite as I pointed out is the lack of good spells to apply it, Flameblast was a good one, now HoT is pretty good with Stormfire. Elementalist got some nice things going for Ele ailments because of the 20% shock floor which acts as a scalable 20% more multi on the initial hit + the ignite dmg.

Right now Ignite is definitely way too specifically tied to Elementalist with no options for creativity. But I don't think Ignite itself needs rework or to be widely available for all ascendancies, just some spells finetuning or some multipliers somewhere.

I really don't like when a %more multi is the solution to something, but in this very specific case, it seems like it would be the right call. HIT HARD BURN HARD, is what ignite should be built around, and adding a new "combustion" support gem could add some different build paths for faster hitting spells.

1
Odds_OPHierophant•

Essentially the goal would be to reward players that use Ignite in multiple small hits, as well as players who use it in fewer bigger hits, so that way it feels like the player is constantly involved.

I don't have a lot of time atm to respond to your complete post, but this is exactly what I'm trying to communicate. Right now, I think the biggest salient gameplay issue with ignite is that if the numbers are too big, it clears way too quickly - and if the numbers are too small, players are left sitting around at bosses doing basically nothing for the entire duration of their ignites.

Upon a quick skim, Combustion sounds fun, but I'm pretty spooked by any damage mechanic that depends on arbitrary monster life% breakpoints. Hmm.

Regardless, thank you for your feedback!

5
LoateWriter of Words, Dier of Characters•

So the reason for the arbitary monster life% breakpoints is to prevent the Shock/Chill/Freeze problem of having to devote your entire build to the mechanics if you want them to even work on endgame content (which you referenced with Shaper/Uber Atziri). Having the threshold be dependent on the monster, and not the damage dealt to the monster, means you know you'll always get that Combustion proc, but it's up to you as a player to maximize its effect (should you choose to go heavily towards Ignite/Combustion). Otherwise it's just a nice bonus at certain intervals that makes your Ignites feel like they're doing something.

In addition, that's also why I included the "removes all Ignites/Combustions" when hitting a breakpoint, to prevent a chain reaction of instant death from 90%. You'll get a big bang, but you'll have to build back into it once it goes off (which, again, promotes more player interaction).

I foresee it, at fully optimal levels, operating like something that (on Shaper/Uber Atziri) gives you around a 4-8% instant hit when you get that 90% threshold, but then you're starting again from zero in terms of your Ignites because they all just got cleared (thus forcing you to engage with boss mechanics). It also means players have to figure out the optimal stacking for Combustion - too big a Combustion hit, and you're too close to your next threshold, which means you won't have time to stack enough for another big Combustion hit (but then you can stack on the next threshold, etc. etc.).

tl;dr - Arbitrary breakpoints mean you know you'll get 9 Combustions on bosses, but it's up to you to maximize the damage appropriately.

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1
Sparrow50Unannounced•

This idea feels way too complex for a simple Elemental Ailment, but does make sense and could be salvaged into an unique's effect.

I like the idea of Ignite being about ramping a fire up then letting it die, but that only brings up Poison-like mechanics.

Objects that start burning always start slowly, then it scales up really fast and finally, the flame slowly gets smaller and smaller until it fades out. Maybe there's some idea to be taken out of this.

1
GooGeishElementalist•

I know quite a few others who are also in agreement that ignite needs a change. I hope to see something come out of this and that we can get some solid feedback and what to do with ignite.

Can vouch that this a solid post having read through it

13
sergeantminorChampion•

This is probably the most detailed and well-reasoned suggestion I've ever seen on this subreddit. I actually really like the idea, and, whether or not it's a sound solution, I fully agree with what your evaluation of what an ignite rework should and should not contain. Whatever we get, it should have asymmetry with other DoT mechanics.

11
Odds_OPHierophant•

Thank you for the glowing review!

1
sergeantminorChampion•

No problem! It had never crossed my mind to rework ignite in any way other than strictly numerically. I like the idea of adding more flavor to it because, as you said, there's too much overlap between ignite and bleed, such that one will always be a worse version of the other.

Another thing that crossed my mind was going the other direction: preserving ignite's mechanics (but numerically buffing it and the skills/mechanics that support it), and instead reworking bleed from the ground up. I haven't put nearly as much thought into this as you have into ignite, but thematically I think it might make sense.

Currently, bleed has a lot of anti-synergy with attacks because it doesn't play well with fast attacks (since it can't stack). Perhaps if physical attacks got bonus damage against bleeding targets? Granted, this would kinda turn bleed into something in between ignite and shock, but the concept of bleeding amplifying attack damage makes sense to me thematically.

Maybe instead of simply being increased damage taken (like shock), it could be something different mechanically. For example, bonus physical damage on hit that's [a] based on the target's maximum life, [b] dependent on the magnitude of the bleed (compared to max life), and [c] scaled by damage effectiveness (so that slower, harder hitting skills aren't punished). I'll edit this comment with some example numbers when I get home and am able to type on a keyboard instead of my phone.

Just throwing this idea out there because there are lots of people who would rather see ignite retain its "one big hit" flavor and fewer people who care much for building around bleed in its current form. It would also widen the appeal of bleed instead of being totally neglected by the vast majority of attack builds. Lastly, it could incentivize pure-physical builds in the current meta of elemental conversion.

1
vileguynsj•

Really a great post. I'd like to add/comment on a few things.

I don't think the double-dipping fix is very intuitive at all and was not the right fix. It's certainly interesting to discover how it works and build around it, but it takes time and thought to understand. Poison is based on base physical and chaos damage, but it only does chaos damage. 10% increased physical damage - does nothing for poison. 40% less weapon damages - does nothing to poison. It would be much more intuitive to simply scale DoT damage based on the actual hit, as before, but not apply generic increases to the DoT component.

As an example, increased fire damage and fire penetration would both boost the damage of your flameblast, but neither would boost the damage of the ignite directly. No double dipping, intuitive behavior. Increased physical damage would boost your poison as long as your hits has some physical damage pre-conversion, and quill rain wouldn't have a weird interaction.

Next, I don't think we need to worry about the different types of DoT stepping on each others toes. Bleed and Ignite are currently very similar yes, but Bleed stacks or does extra damage while moving. More importantly, builds don't typically have access to both bleed and ignite, so you're probably either melee doing bleed or caster doing ignite. You could be melee doing ignite, but in that case you'd like to be fully converted. One thing that does separate bleed is that it's not reduced by resists or armor.

I say we shouldn't worry about overlap because the biggest problem with non-poison is that it doesn't stack. PoE wants you to attack fast because attacking slow means death. Ignite isn't just about flameblast and bleed isn't just about earthquake, there are plenty of fast hitting skills like Blade Flurry, Flame Totem, Firestorm, etc. that should all have reasonable use of the ailment. It's fine if ignite is better on flameblast then on firestorm, but it shouldn't be night and day.

Shock is a good example of a reasonably balanced damage-focused ailment. Big hits give a big shock, but you're less likely to utilize that shock with big hits (without prolif). If your non-shock damage is 50%-99%, the extra damage on your next hit (if it's the same) is overkill. If your hit is 100%, the bonus from shock never factors in. For hits under 50%, the shock should be big and help a lot. Conversely with weak hits, your first hit will apply a small shock which will boost your next hit, that increased the shock applied, etc. If your hits are really, really small shock might not do much, but it will generally do something. In this case, it's likely that big hitters benefit from shock on bosses more, and quick hitters benefit from shock on trash more, but both benefit. High speed doesn't make shock useless, it just might be better with bigger hits.

Ignite should be like shock or like poison. If it's like poison, IMO poison should last longer than ignite, not the other way around. We could drop it down to 1s duration and let subsequent hits extend the duration by a flat amount that can exceed 1s (maybe also increasing the damage by a small amount, but without a cap this could be crazy vs bosses, kinda like Scorching Ray). This means that big slow hits get their full ignite DPS without any clipping or lost overlap, and fast hits lose less damage to overlap while also increasing the dot damage. The numbers on this are up to GGG to determine.

If it's going to be like shock, it should do 2 things: it should have an impact on a single hit (unlike shock I believe), and it should boost further fire damage. Scorching Ray is a great example of this type of behavior, but it shouldn't work exactly the same because we want this to be applicable to both fast and big hits. If it still burns, then it's fine for big hits. Rather than making multiple ignites stack (or having a second shorter ignite as OP suggested), we can simply replace the existing ignite with a more powerful one or give a debuff that causes your next ignites to be more powerful.

Example 1: first ignite does 100 dps with a normal duration, second ignite would do 100 dps, but because of the existing ignite that is consumed, it does 150 dps with a normal duration (regardless of the time remaining for the previous ignite). The third ignite does 225 dps. This is different from poison because poison stacks should fall off constantly while new stacks are applied. Outside of items that provide a boost for the number of poison stacks, each poison would do the same damage and stacking them just means not losing damage. This type of ignite would lose damage from "stacking," but not the full amount. It would benefit both fast and slow attackers in a comparable way (favoring slow). And it doesn't overlap with shock because it doesn't boost your non-fire DoT or your damage from hits, it only boosts itself. It also wouldn't take away from poison's identity because there are no stacks to scale on, just a single ignite.

Example 2: your hits apply a 100 dps ignite but they also apply a debuff that increases burning damage taken by some % based on percent of life dealt (like shock). Unlike shock, this effect would stack. Big hits would benefit from larger debuffs per stack and wouldn't hit the cap, small hits would benefit from applying multiple stacks but would eventually hit the cap. Think of it as a hybrid between Shock and Wither.

I think poison stacking is actually rough on GGG's servers and the main reason ignite doesn't stack (RIP Emberwake), so we should avoid adding more stacking DoTs. Refreshing DoTs with changed values should be fine, and stacking debuffs don't seem to be an issue.

10
welpxD•

10% increased physical damage - does nothing for poison.

Poison works like damage conversion, essentially you're converting from phys damage into chaos DoT, so 10% global phys damage does increase the poison. Assassin's phys/chaos starter nodes """double-dip""" in that both %incs apply to poisons you inflict from physical sources.

You're right that "weapon damage" doesn't affect poison, but most weapon nodes have ailment damage on them. This mostly comes up in the form of Less mods not applying, which imo is great, it feels like a clever little interaction that the player can feel good for exploiting.

edit: By the way, Bleed vs Ignite overlap used to be okay imo because Ignite was for spells (with a few exceptions), Bleed was for attacks. Like you said, they stayed on their respective halves of the tree. However, attacks are now arguably better for ignites than spells b/c of EDWA, so there could be an issue where both bleed and ignite trees look and feel almost the same.

8
vileguynsj•

Not sure how I messed that up. I guess I conflated phys increases being near-worthless on a quill rain build for them being actually worthless. Apologies.

2
ErrorLoadingNameFileRaider•

Im 99% sure this is wrong, physical dmg will under no circumstance increase your poison dmg anymore, ever.

-2
welpxD•

Phys damage even increases ignites inflicted through the Added Fire support. You can test it in-game, just link Infernal Blow with Chance to Ignite, and equip a Rustic Sash. The tooltip will show a higher ignite. It works pretty much exactly like damage conversion.

2
ErrorLoadingNameFileRaider•

Okay that is true because you convert to fire and have a higher base fire damage which scales the ignite. Because that is all the damage is based arround, the base fire amount before scaling modifiers.

2
Kazang•

It does, if the poison is inflicted by a physical hit. It won't increase poison based on chaos damage though.

This is the reason Brutality was nerfed/changed to have a no chaos damage modifier, as in the beta it was a massive multiplier for poison and was out of line with other supports.

1
terminbee•

But now elemental damage is just so much better. Even with resists, elemental damage way outscale pure physical builds. Not sure if that holds true in the hundreds of exalt price range though, as I don't have that kind of money.

1
welpxD•

GGG really has their work cut out for them with Ignite. You outlined the identity issues Ignite has, so I'll point out where most of the balance deficiencies come from.

Normal builds focus on one skill, and scale the damage with: support gems, +flat dmg, %inc dmg, attack/cast speed, maybe crit, and maybe flasks. Then they use whatever various effective %more multi's like -resists/penetration, added projectiles, %phys added as extra, %inc dmg taken mods like wither, etc.

So let's look at ignite. Ignite:

  • doesn't work with most active skill gems b/c it needs one big hit. Firestorm, for example, would make a terrible ignite build, and there's nothing you can do to change that.

  • can use +flat normally, good

  • cannot use many support gems, such as melee phys, controlled destruction, fire pen... there are about 8 gems that apply to ignite in any way, and they tend to be tradeoffs between up-front damage and DoT damage (compare to bleed, where your hit and DoT damage are scaled simultaneously by Melee Phys, Maim etc)

  • scales off of %inc damage the same way any other build does, which becomes problematic as I'll discuss later

  • attack/cast speed - useless

  • crit - mostly useless, except that you need to crit for 100% ignite chance; other (scarce) sources of ignite chance come in 5-10% packages on standalone passive nodes, making it impractical to hit 100% (again, compare to bleed/poison, where they're 10% minimum and are often bundled in on other good damage nodes)

  • flasks - ignite does not have a single damage flask; compare to poison with insane Coralito's, or nearly any other build with Atziri's Promise

  • other - ignite is not affected by penetration, but can use profitably use EE; unlike poison, ignite is not boosted by duration, and its dps curse is weaker to an extreme degree (not that dps curses are reliable anyway b/c hexproof, bosses, etc.); to be fair, Dyadus is kind of OP, but I'm sure GGG will get around to balancing that item sooner or later

It's worth mentioning that, again unlike Poison, Ignite has little passive tree or Ascendancy support. Passives - you take all the possible %inc Fire damage plus the single Burn cluster, and that leaves you at about 95 points spent, even after getting all your life, aoe, MoM etc. %Inc is naturally soft-capped by the game, which hurts ignite more than most, again because of the one-big-hit idea. The worst part is that spell dmg nodes weren't given any ailment scaling, so the only class whose starting area makes any sense for Ignite is Shadow.
Ascendancies - ele crit has Inquisitor, poison has Assassin/Trickster/Pathfinder, Ignite has Elementalist. Elementalist is okay, but offers more utility than damage, especially since fire pen doesn't matter to Ignite. The main advantage of Elementalist is that it enables Dyadus, which, again, will probably be nerfed sometime soon.

It is accurate to say that Ignite has next to nothing going for it. An ignite rework would have to include nearly every system in the game.

Personally, I think the most important thing to address with an ignite rework would be the ailment asymmetry between attacks and spells. Attacks can bleed, spells can't. Attacks have skills that synergize extra with poison, while BV has a damage penalty for poison and is capped at a low 5 hits/second. Chill, Freeze, and Shock are pretty neutral to attacks vs spells, maybe slightly advantaged to spells because of the placement of the ailment-modifying nodes but not by much. In fact, attack skills also have better ignite scaling than spells because of the "Elemental Damage with Attack Skills" gem and item mod, and better scaling on passive nodes.

Ignite feels like it should be the main caster ailment like Bleed is for attacks. Hopefully GGG can make it happen.

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Odds_OPHierophant•

This is insightful and relevant. Thank you for your additional commentary.

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Drop_•

I think you're wrong about elementalist becoming overpowered if ignite gets good.

While elementalist will be (and kind of is) a reasonable choice for ignite under some circumstances, proliferation is readily available (ignite proliferation, xoph's inception) and chance to ignite/crit are both much more reliable than the timing based conflicts. Elementalist doesn't have the most fire damage, and they curiously don't have a big boost to ignite damage.

Inquisitor and chieftain both have bigger potential fire damage, and likely a crit based fire assassin would be on the table too. Because ignite proliferation provides both a more multiplier as well as a bigger radius than beacon, I don't see the major value of elementalist for ignite.

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Odds_OPHierophant•

Because ignite proliferation provides both a more multiplier as well as a bigger radius than beacon, I don't see the major value of elementalist for ignite.

There's value to this point, but I think the expense of a gem slot is just too much, especially for a mechanic that's as weak as Ignite currently is.

There are other reasons that Ignite Elementalist becomes very, very strong relative to other options - and we can see those historically, as well as by looking at the amount of increased agnostic +damage% attainable through stacking of golem buffs.

There is every possibility that I'm wrong - this is just me trying to make a solid argument for a specific type of rework for Ignite.

1
cohbabe•

Great thread! Just my own two cents to add.

In my opinion the game could benefit from an overhaul to elemental/ailment identity. As they've shown recently with the ascendancy re-work that identity is important to the classes I think it's equally important to skills, elements and ailments.

My suggestions: note: not a game designer, probably horribly imbalanced, more going for a strong identity then for balance so feel free to tweak numbers or concepts as you see fit

Cold

Cold damage I think is a perfect representation of cohesive identity that works thematically and in-game. Cold hits chill and slow your enemies, stronger hits (crits) freeze and stop your enemies action completely, which is an intuitive natural progression as OP stated. These bonuses are purely defensive with no added offensive capability which I think is completely fine due to their power.

No change necessary!

Fire

First let’s simplify. Ignite and burn should be merged, there’s no need to have a confusing unintuitive difference between what is effectively the same thing just applied differently in different situations. Secondly, let’s give this a split between damage and defensive ability.

From there let’s give fire two effects in the same vein as Cold has already.

• Ignite – Can be applied by RF or scorching ray effects at 100% effect while enemies are in the radius / beam OR from direct hits & crits with fire damage. If you hit with a fire skill it applies a burn at 40% of the hit damage which scales down 10% every second to 0%. Every hit with fire damage refreshes the damage back to 40% and it begins to scale down again. I feel this makes sense as if you’re on fire, you’re gonna be putting it out and reducing its effect over time.

• Concuss – Thematically I think this fits as your direct damage fire spells are typically ‘explosive’ in nature and concussion waves are a result of explosions – it’s intuitive (to my mind at least). This would be applied from crits with direct fire damage spells in an area around the point of impact but outside the area that the damage is dealt in and would cause enemies to have 30% reduced action speed (movement, attack and cast) and 30% reduced chance to hit with all attacks and spells for X seconds. Kind of like a bomb going off, everything in the blast radius is heavily damaged / dead everything close by is concussed and stunned.

Lightning

Let’s make this our glass cannon all offensive, no defensive power ability.

• Shock – Already well implemented, move this to hits instead of crits. Buff or nerf this accordingly so it isn’t op.

• Electrify – Deals extra direct damage to an enemy that is already shocked and chains to X nearby enemies depending on damage dealt. Sort of a bit of extra dps to the main target and some chain lightning effect nearby. Not gonna try with numbers here as it could already be too OP.

I think having two levels of debuff for each element makes it more interesting to build around, as long as access for the second level debuff is still available to non-crit builds if they wish to invest some points in it.

Final thought regarding Bleed. It never made sense to me that poison was the stacking debuff and bleed was the single hit debuff (slighty different now with crimson dance). However the quintessential bleed fantasy class is the gladiator. As a gladiator you are going into a fight drawing it out performing small cuts constantly on your opponents over time until they die the “death of a thousand cuts” and bleed out. Bleed should be the ramping up dot debuff not poison! Reeeee.

Anyway thanks for reading and feel free to tear me a new one over my terrible game design choices.

EDIT: formatting, first long post so i have no idea what i'm doing

6
terminbee•

But if bleed is the "death of a thousand cuts" ailment, then what would poison be? Wouldn't make sense for poison to be scaling off a big hit. I agree with your theme of bleed because that's what I imagine bleed to be too.

Maybe poison can be the infinitely stacking DOT while bleed stacks for a limited amount, then bursts i.e. once you hit 8 stacks of bleed, the DOT is doubled for rest of duration/duration refreshes.

2
cohbabe•

I don't have a great idea for poison tbh, thematically poison to me should have a heavier debuff component, like shit I've been poisoned now I can't stop throwing up everywhere and I can't move because I'm paralysed / in extreme agony etc. Doesn't really work for me as a huge damage dealer. I have no problem with poison stacking as a mechanic but yeah would be boring to have both poison and bleed be mechanically the same. I just think they made the wrong choice with which one does what haha

1
welpxD•

Poison giving a "less dmg" modifier would actually be really cool, it'd make poison builds inherently tankier which is needed. They'd have to rebalance passive nodes a bit so that poison wasn't as available to non-poison builds, but that's doable.

2
terminbee•

I think that'd work in most other games but POE doesn't really do status ailments. Chill and freeze are really the only ones and they already cover slow + stun (freeze is kinda like a stun). For poison to make someone sick, or for bleed to weaken them would trample onto chill's territory if it slows. If it lowers their damage well...you'd likely rather have more damage. It's actually not a bad idea for boss killing builds, but I don't know if GGG wants to embrace the status ailment idea, with debuffs for monsters. Most of their skills seem to revolve around ways to increase damage.

1
cohbabe•

I feel it could be done in a flavourful way that adds an extra layer of defense to the ailment such as imagine if when poisoned enemies had x chance to be incapacitated for 1 second periodically. It has it's own thematic flavour and also provides a method (albeit RNG based) of mitigating some damage. As poison is heavily gated through Assassin atm and there is basically no defense in their ascendancy I think it could be a welcome addition while maintaining a separate and unique identity. I'm just spit balling but I think there's a lot of room for GGG to invest in heartier more fleshed out ailment identities.

1
Tortunga•

It's a good read, and while I do agree with your arguments why ignite need some love and what it shouldn't become, I cannot find myself in your suggestion.

Like somebody already said it's quit complicated how it works for a simple ailment effect, and to me it sounds to much as poison as well.

Ignoring your suggestion, it hits on the core problem with Ignite though; It just doesn't scale with enough stats on your gear. The two main skills that can get good value out of ignite are Explosive arrow and flameblast; 2 skills that can somewhat turn AS/CS into more damage in a single hit.

Just allowing it to stack is a simple, effective, but extremely lazy way of fixing this. They already turned bleed in semi-poison with the crimson dance keystone, ignite shouldn't get turned in something like it as well.

An idea I had myself is just increase ignites base damage, but it will extinguish over time. Faster hitting ignite builds would just refresh their ignite before it really start to extinguish, while the much slower hitting ones (mainly EA and Flamebase) would require to invest in ignite duration to increase the effectiveness of their ignite. It provides reverse AS scaling really; It's base is most effective on quit fast hitting builds, and requires additional investment for slow hitting builds.

It would require some rebalance of Ignite and it's base duration, including ignite tree nodes and uniques, but it would at least be something ells then just allowing it to stack. And maybe crits shouldn't ignite automatically, as increasing it's base damage would allow for a good amount of extra damage with little investment for crit builds, as crits will automatically ignite.

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posts_awkward_truths•

Incredible post. Not once did I think TL;Not going to read and skip to the end.

I think that I agree with u/InSearchofThe9 in saying that its a pretty complex solution that you've come up with, but perhaps something that fits the same theme but is much more simple would work.

I got the idea from the passive ability of Brand from League of legends. Every time you inflict an ignite, it does more damage, up to a point at which it explodes for damage around the target.

Converted to PoE, it could be something like 4 second duration 40% of the initial hit as damage, stacks up to 3 times. If a fourth stack of ignite is applied, all damage from the previous 3 ignites is dealt instantly in an area around the ignited target and applying a fresh ignite based on this explosion.

This would support two different kinds of gameplay, one where you cast a skill (lets say flameblast) once every 1.333 seconds in order to maximize the damage of the dot and then trigger it right as the last stack is about to expire in order to gain the damage again, and another where you apply ignites (with lets say incinerate) as fast as possible, spreading the ignites rapidly through a pack. The 1st way would probably provide the most dps, but the 2nd way your ignites will steadily intensify as the ignite explosion itself applies high damage ignites (3 fully charged incinerate shots *.4 aka 1.2 fully charged incinerate shot)to everything around the initial target, increasing the damage of the NEXT ignite explosion. After 10 cycles the ignite explosions will be dealing over 6 times the damage of the actual incinerate shots

Thematically they both fit. The first like like pumping bellows into a forge for a powerful consistent damage. The second is closer to throwing flame into dry wood where the flame continues to intensify as it finds more fuel.

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Seeders•

What I like about your proposal is that it is kind of like "Adding more heat to the fire".

Fire does damage based on how hot it is. Sustained heat should add more stacks of burn and increase fire damage taken over time.

I think lightning shocks should be kinda like conduits, where if there is nothing near you and you get shocked, it's only 1 stack. But if you are shocked next to 5 minions, you all get 5 stacks of shock. When a shocked character gets hit with lightning damage, it will take the damage as well as split it to all nearby shocked units (but would not cause the same effect to chain)

Chill and freeze are perfect.

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VerisiChampion•

I hate the way double-dipping was fixed, though I think it's fine that ignite is generally focused around singular, large hits.

I just wish it just took the total hit damage (of types that apply to the ailment; ie fire damage for ignite), chopped by some % (based on ailment), then applied any multipliers that didn't also apply to the hit (ie burning/ailment damage) and provided that as damage per second.

For example, for ignite (without shenanigans like 3 dragons), it'd look like this:

Total fire damage dealt * .4 * (ailment/burning damage multipliers) = ignite fire damage per second.

This would provide a simple and easy way to understand ailment damage and would mean that the ignite at least does some damage without scaling it specifically.

Ways to push ailment damage would then be on the ailment nodes/support gems themselves, not bandaged onto every goddamn attacking node on the tree.

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evil-teddyMirror_Bomb•

I think you're wrong. I think ignite is in a fine place BUT the game doesn't currently work with it.

Ignite does a lot of damage and could be great for clearing maps except if you move 2 screens away from an ignited enemy the ignite vanishes into thin air ( < 2 seconds). This means your ignites don't get a chance to actually do their damage unless you stop and wait which feels awful. Decay has the same problem.

I understand why this limitation exists but if it could be worked around specifically for dots it would make a huge difference.

Ignite sucks against bosses but I'm 90% sure that's intended.

It should not clear maps by itself too easily when paired with Proliferation - Lightpoacher in particular is dangerous here. Spectral Throw, Burning Arrow, and other projectiles are also very likely to get out of control if this isn’t controlled for.

Forget about this, wanders clear maps in 30 seconds.

If people actually want a new mechanic for ignite then how about this.

Ignited enemies burn surrounding enemies for 50% of the damage of the ignite. Prolif spreads ignites but not burns. The damage from this is obviously insane for pack clear but who cares. You might have to destroy corpses on death so this can't abuse worm flasks against bosses.

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a_secret_giraffe•

For reference I have made like 5-6 ignite based builds this league, including a level 80-something melee ice crash ignite prolif elementalist that was able to clear low tier red maps... just. Scaling them is infuriating. Here are some thoughts:

A huge problem with ignites is that they don't scale off penetration. This means that eg the herald nodes in elementalist do not in fact help an ignite-focused build while actually making the burns from herald of ash bigger because the hits which cause the overkill are scaled by the penetration! The fact that the only way to scale burns on enemies with resistance is via curses and flat debuffs, and curses are egregiously useless on high hp targets (eg map bosses and shaper) means that you are pigeon-holed into fiddly elemental equilibrium nonsense - as taking an enemy like shaper from 40% fire res to -10% is an 83% more multiplier and usually scorching ray totem.

Just consider: a level 20 flammability is -44% resistance. Let's imagine we have enough curse effect to get to -50% res. Versus shaper that is -10% fire resistance! This is vastly less effect than popping a wise oak for a hit-based build, and less than half of the effect of herald pen on hits. There are countless ways to get flat penetration now - from ele notables, inquisitor, elementalist, ascendant, many unique necks giving 20% cold or 10% fire pen etc etc. This is absolutely not the case for ignite.

In fact the problem gets worse because broadly it seemed like the original idea was to give you extraordinarily powerful supports that would apply specifically to dot effects, so you could choose to lose up front damage and backload your dots instead. To do this you are already giving up a lot; leech, allowing monsters to live for longer and therefore placing yourself at greater risk, slowing down the rate at which all loot on a screen drops and thus sometimes slowing down clear - so presumably this tradeoff should give you greater damage. What is bizarre about this is that it is not the case; the only 60% more multiplier you get is, uh, deadly ailments (which hilariously reduces the power of the other elemental ailments, shock, chill and freeze, as you hit less hard...). That's the same multiplier as brutality, and 5% more than weapon ele. The other gems are mostly shit: efficacy is terrible, burning damage is 55% and ok, swift affliction is 45% and has a downside which is 5% lower than melee physical damage which scales 2 dots AND has no downside.

And it gets worse: let's imagine you try perfect agony. Let's imagine you go marylene's fallacy because hey; if ignite has a 5-second duration with some nodes then I just need to roll 1 crit every 5 seconds, so I should get lots of crit multi. Now I grab coralito's signature to avoid having some horrible pathing and... I pop coralito's signature. I have 500% crit multi. I get to 255% ailment multi. W-wow............................... 350% multi translates into a 70% more multiplier for all that investment and stupid planning and self crippling versus having no multi at all and just using the default 150% multi. This is less effect than ele equilibrium versus an enemy with 40% res. It's beyond underwhelming.

It seems screamingly obvious that if you stop a damage source from having ways to scale like the damage it comes from with a tiny number of gimmicky ways to scale (pyre and the 160% odd burning damage on tree aside, which wash out to insignificance versus the absurd inc % you get in most builds anyway) AND it slows you down AND you lose a bunch of advantages then it will be stupid?

One big problem is that burn damage stuff buffs righteous fire. OK, so make ignite-specific supports or nodes or something. Burning damage is to broad a church. But right now ignite is infuriating to use.

As an elementalist you have no way to scale ignites by reducing enemy resistances; in fact you are LESS able to scale ignites via this route than an occultist who at least gets 25% curse effect!

There is also the deeply confusing way that the ignite ailment scales off modifiers like "your cold damage can ignite". You would assume something like well, this is an ailment which deals fire damage, the way ailments work is that they take the base damage of the hit which can deal damage then they scale that base number purely based on the multipliers that you have that can scale this ailment. This is NOT the case with this modifier; if you have stormfire, lightning damage now scales ignite. If you have conflux on a 100% pure physical hit then global physical modifiers increase the size of that burn! This is... sort of weird and unintuitive and feels like it should be tidied up a bit, because it results in an even more bizarre build pattern where eg using hrimburn gets you vastly easier access to damage nodes which are desperately needed to scale burns and simultaneously gives you free use of ele equilibrium.

Until dyadus is nerfed, ignite is going to be very confusingly balanced. Dual dyadus is a 200% more (in most situations) multiplier. This is absolutely INSANE - and it can be put on animated guardians. If they buff ignite they need to bring those numbers down a bit, stop them stacking, or something.

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seikuu•

Great post, thanks for writing this.

My favorite build to this day was hidden potential fire trap elementalist in breach. Just throw a trap and watch an entire pack explode in flames. I think proliferation is tied to the identity of ignite - ignite without proliferation is unphysical. When something catches on fire in real life, that fire spreads. It might spread slowly depending on availability of oxygen and the kinetics of heat diffusion, but it spreads nonetheless.

So I think ignite should have built-in prolif. Maybe add a time delay between each prolif so you can't just ignite a whole pack at once. Elementalist/unique gear can have reductions to this number, so the process of igniting a mob is faster. Then set the maximum number of ignites to 5 or some low number. If something is on fire in multiple locations, it will evidently burn faster. But it can't have infinite fires because they'll spread and combine to make one big flame rather quickly. Now the identity of ignite is separate from bleed (single big hit) and poison (lots of small hits).

The focus of an ignite-based build then becomes -- figuring out how to spread your ignite as fast as possible. You can do this by increasing AoE (which is very much in theme with elementalist) or reducing the prolif time delay. If you want to maximize your damage against packs, you either want a single big hit over a large area (like flameblast) so that each enemy is ignited and all the ignites prolif.

Completely separate suggestion - make it possible to ignite an enemy an infinite number of times, but decrease ignite duration for each ignite applied. Things that are ignited multiple times should burn faster. It probably has to be something like duration = 1/log(n) because duration = 1/(n) or duration = exp(-n) would be completely broken with a large number of ignites (n), which makes it the same as poison in terms of identity. With this kind of formula, stacking too many ignites is somewhat pointless, but it's also not just a single hit like bleed.

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Warmag2•

If you were a top50 player in Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, I should remember you. What nick did you use?

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Odds_OPHierophant•

_PINK. Hell, I also had an account named Odds that was something like 67 wins / 0 losses / 11 ties for a month or so. That's when I first started using this tag.

Top 3 is more accurate if we're talking about FA, at least towards the end of the time I played. FunkOff always had my number (except in SupCom 2 when I finally beat him in tournament and won the laptop I ended up using for years) and Unconq was spooky in tournament, but pretty much nobody else had a winning record on me iirc.

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Warmag2•

Okay, you weren't just boasting and I do remember you. I also remember playing against you.

You might remember me if you played 2v2 or 4v4 against the finns, but I was considerably lower in the 1v1 rankings than you (top200 or so in FA). The nick was either the same I'm using here or just "Warma" without the g2.

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Odds_OPHierophant•

It sounds vaguely familiar (I want to say you played Cybran and liked picking grey?), but I don't really have any specific memories, I'm sorry. I was never much of a Seton's or teams player - if I got dragged into teams I was more liable to simultaneously nuke everyone else in the game than I was to play it out normally. :x

I, uh, may also have you confused with Wamsa, a grey Yoshi player in my local Smash Bros scene.

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Warmag2•

Both of your recollections are correct. I also picked yellow though.

Never liked Setons either, because it was too much of a pure economy game with 20min buildup and then just constant commander sniping. We tried to pick the more dynamic maps and even built some for that purpose. The yellowish brown Titan -themed maps were made by us for multiplayer use: http://faemiyah.fi/temp/supreme_commander/previews/horsehead_island_overview.jpg

I also modded the game, both refining Zulan's keymapping mod (http://faemiyah.fi/temp/supreme_commander/zulan_hotbuild_-_warma_keymapping.png) and working on some of the UI mods (partially rewrote AdmiralZeech's tiered grouping mod for extra features, but considering how shitty the performance of that one was, I'm not really proud of it).

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OrezRekirts•

Alright, how about this

Ignite does x amount of damage, and each time ignite procs it averages out, AND increases the duration by a second.

We can either add that 1 second and have it start at like 3 seconds and not have an increased burn rate which would give people an incentive to go ignite proc to stack it up to 20-25 seconds

OR we could have it also increased the burn rate by lets say 20% (+ more based on skill tree) and this affects the TOTAL time. and it would effect it in this fashion. Starts at 20-30 seconds, second proc makes it go 20% faster so 24%, 3rd proc 28.8%, until time runs out.

Which goes into the NEXT effect, have an effect where if the target has been fully burned throughout the duration the next burn is increased by 20%. You can do so by a unique or by a node.

What this does:

It will allow fire magic damage to remain in tact with it's damage if it crits and applies burn, as well as giving it incentive to maybe going into a reduced duration burn build, or if need be an increased duration burn build with high proc on ignite, to be able to keep a VERY long lasting burn on bosses. Maybe cap it to 10-20s?

It also would give it the first interaction that people would choose between either having a crit chance fire build which would rely on heavy crits to reduce the time on the debuff, or a build with heavy proc % which would revolve around getting as many ignite procs as possible on a target to continually increase the 20% burn debuff that's left on it.

Just spitballin here, I can see it being very fun to make builds around that.

Its not like Shock, because it doesn't scale the % multiplier damage with how much damage it does, only that the burn debuff disappears.

Its not like Poison, because it does not stack indefinitely, it just refreshes + adds to a set duration cap

It'd be entirely unique on its own mechanic.

P.S. 9/10 of my builds involved fire/burning in some way-shape-or-form, bear trap burning, a lot of fire traps + ignite builds, and some fireball crit builds.

I think with these changes I would love to go maybe a full on burn build again.

Im a little tired so this is probably really shitty format, and i just kept editting it, but I would LOVE a living bomb mechanic in this game where there is a payout for the fire running out

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_freetime_Pathfinder•

lol

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ZloezloE Q J U G G•

yea

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EquilibriumxRaider•

exactly my "thought"

like i respect the amount of work and thought he put in this post and it's admirable how one can write so much about a mechanic in a video game but while i was reading i was just thinking "why"

maybe i'm too normie to understand but i just couldn't ever endure sitting in front of my PC writing this long of a text about a single mechanic in a video game, i'd be bored out of my mind

but then again i do understand the passion i guess, i could write about things that interest me / things i love for this long too so eh

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[deleted]•

[removed]

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GustsoutoElementalist•

I made a similar post yesterday, talking about traps and ignite. I can't upvote this post more than once, +1.

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